Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone should whip up a little community-driven service that would serve all known ad network hosts.
So we'll have ublock/adblock without the parts that block the ads.
I've been running various blocking and reporting systems for coming on 20 years myself, and find that applying my own hygiene controls to network traffic is ... surprisingly effective. Not bulletproof by any means (though reasonably effective against "bulletproof" hosting providers), but it massively reduces attack service.
I've been thinking a lot about networks, size and scale, and the corresponding levels of abuse. To a rough approximation, the Internet grew by an order of magnitude from 1969 to 1970 (1 to 10 nodes), 1977, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1993, 1995, 2000, and 2012 (1 billion nodes).
The "Linux Sucks" guy (multiple presos at Linux conferences on the state of breakage within Linux) did a preso recently on the IoT, noting that we're going to be looking at roughly 80 billion nodes by 2020. I'm wondering what that will do to various forms of abuse.
In the 1970s there was Phreaking and John "Captain Crunch" Draper. In the 1980s, the first boot-sector viruses (Brain: 1986) and the Morris Worm (1988). War dialing was a thing.
Through the 1990s, there was Usenet spam, first jokes like Make Money Fast, then Green Card. With the spread of the WWW, the first banner ads, pop-ups, and click fraud.
2000s: adware and spyware (bug-for-bug compatible reimplimentation on Android now), ID theft, high-profile viruses (Nimda, Code Red, Welchia, Slammer...), DDoS, and Phishing.
In the 2010s, click fraud and various forms of doxxing and pranking lead to wholsesale attacks on liberal democracy itself, with A/B tested bots and informational attacks.
I'm looking for a concept of network scale and problems encountered out of this.